I hope to have an R version of this in the near future. (I still like using data to merge together large cross-country data sets. For example, the full World Values Survey is a bit unwieldy in R.)

Update 20 February 2012: I just ran across Vincent Arel-Bundock's countrycode package for R. I haven't tried it out yet, but from reading the documentation it looks like countrycode does pretty much what my do-file does, but better, e.g. it includes more country coding schemes. Vincent Arel-Bundock is also the author of another R package I really like, WDI. WDI makes it easy to grab World Bank Indicators. I've used it a number of times in post for this blog.

Here are the slides from a presentation I'm giving at Waseda University this weekend. The presentation is based on a paper I wrote with Mícheál O'Keeffe on how policymakers choose responses to banking crises. We specifically look at South Korea and Ireland. It uses the unofficial LSE beamer class I created.